Denying the antecedent, sometimes also called inverse error, is a formal fallacy, committed by reasoning in the form:
Arguments of this form are invalid. Informally, this means that arguments of this form do not give good reason to establish their conclusions, even if their premises are true.
The name denying the antecedent derives from the premise "not P", which denies the "if" clause of the conditional premise.
One way to demonstrate the invali...
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Denying the antecedent, sometimes also called inverse error, is a formal fallacy, committed by reasoning in the form:
Arguments of this form are invalid. Informally, this means that arguments of this form do not give good reason to establish their conclusions, even if their premises are true.
The name denying the antecedent derives from the premise "not P", which denies the "if" clause of the conditional premise.
One way to demonstrate the invalidity of this argument form is with a counterexample with true premises but an obviously false conclusion. For example:
That argument is obviously bad, but arguments of the same form can sometimes seem superficially convincing, as in the following example imagined by Alan Turing in the article "Computing Machinery and Intelligence":
However, men could still be machines that do not follow a definite set of rules. Thus this argument (as Turing intends) is invalid.
It is possible that an argument that denies the antecedent could be valid, if the...
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